Despite evidence that removing children from their homes traumatizes them, millions are still being forced to live with strangers or adopted out like shelter pets. One activist recently told Congress that many children are sent to “clearly inadequate families” just so social service agencies “can ‘succeed’ by boosting their numbers.”

Children like 13-year-old Alexis "Lexie" Agyepong-Glover, who was dumped, still alive, into an icy creek in Prince William County and left to die. Lexie was never removed from adopted mother Alfreedia Gregg-Glover’s home despite numerous reports of abuse. She ran away three times in the weeks prior to her death, but the authorities kept bringing her back.

The reason is as chilling as the crime: The child welfare system had already “cashed in” on Lexie, and had no further interest in her.

Richard Wexler, executive director of the Alexandria-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, says Virginia collected a “bounty” of at least $4,000 for placing Lexie with the woman accused of killing her. Author of “Wounded Innocents,” Wexler says children are routinely abused by the very people claiming to protect them, and most foster children do not emerge from their ordeal unscathed.

“One recent study of [15,000] foster care ‘alumni’ found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be ‘doing well’,” Wexler says. “How can throwing children into a system which churns out walking wounded four times out of five be ‘erring on the side of the child’?”

Eighty percent of children in foster care are worse off than comparatively mistreated children who remain at home; only children placed in orphanages fare worse, and doing nothing actually does less long-term damage. An 80 percent failure rate should be enough to close down any government program, but social service agencies are rewarded with millions of dollars instead.

Social workers are so busy destroying families, Wexler says, that they invariably miss the most horrendous cases of abuse, which is why nobody intervened before Gregg-Glovers, Banita Jacks, and Renee Bowman allegedly murdered their children. A surge of needless removals usually accompanies such high-publicity cases, so Prince William parents, beware: There’s a greater danger your children will be taken away after this government screw-up.

Many foster parents are wonderful people who make heroic efforts to ease the suffering of abused and neglected children. But some are like the southwestern Virginia woman described by one of several foster children placed in her care:

“The Kitchen and even on the game controllers and floor of the house had the remains of spilled food and drink and dead insects on the counter tops and floor... We ate meals consisting of ground Turkey and Rice and Peas almost every day. I lost alot of weight.....

“We weren't the only ones starving either the dogs they had were emaciated and infested with fleas and ticks so bad that the one dog that was pregnant was so skinny her bones were showing through and we told her to take it to a vet but she said we would make a game of it and had us pick off the ticks...and stomp on them while she laughed....

“[She] made me clean up the dog poo on the back porch and wash all the dishes every day. There were 9 kids and two adults to clean up after. We...weren't allowed to do anything until the work was done..... [She] broke [my brother’s] stereo that my mom and dad gave him in a visit....

"Any money we were supposed to be getting for clothes and activities was spent by the family. They would go on shopping trips at the mall and buy the other kids shoes and food with our money. When we got mad about it we were told to mind our own business.... “

The boy’s parents were eventually exonerated, but after spending $80,000 to get their five children back, had to sell their house and move out of state. They plan to sue Virginia’s “child protection” system so it doesn’t hurt any more children.

Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor. She can be reached by email at: bhollingworth@dcexaminer.com.

"Eighty percent of children in foster care are worse off than comparatively mistreated children who remain at home; only children placed in orphanages fare worse, and doing nothing actually does less long-term damage. An 80 percent failure rate should be enough to close down any government program, but social service agencies are rewarded with millions of dollars instead."

Kinda makes you think maybe the failure rate is happening on purpose. They fail, they get rewarded. It's in plain sight for anyone to see. They have failed so bad they are being sued currently and have been sued successfully in the past by survivors of the system.

100+ years this has been the story. Only 100 plus years later do people start to get the big picture.

Just think how many people in 100 years affected by this. The sheer amount of children who lost their lives in care or while the responsibility of a system...... beats any major case of mass genocide to date. And instead of putting people in jail. They are rewarded with more money and more children and more power and more secrecy...

I read adoption blogs and articles written about the adoptee's inability to bond and attach to people, (and the subsequent therapies developed for the child with certain mental disorder labels -- like RAD --given to them), and time after time, I wonder just how many of these adoptees are the victims of poor child placement. Keep in mind, this poor quality of care does not exist only in foster care... it's existed for generations in state/private orphanages, (where charity-working pedophiles are allowed to work and visit), and for decades, this cancerous plague has infested state/private Children's Homes where the ultra religious and sexually repressed have abused the very young, too. In fact, since the early 1600's, "unwanted" children have been placed far far away from their homes, simply because the government did not want to be burdened with the care of poor, vagrant children. Did the sending-country (Great Britain) care about the lives of the children shipped far, far away? I'm thinking the government leaders had bigger concerns, which might include:

How can more money be saved?

How much more wealth can be produced?

As a country grows, is a bigger, stronger military needed to keep power and control?

It seems the general public wants to believe ALL foster/adopted children were neglected, abandoned, or abused brutally by their first-parents, when in fact, there are too many cases that prove that "all" rule simply is not true. All one has to do is do a little research on the history of child placement and various child migration schemes to see how the treatment of poor people with children has not changed, in spite of new laws claiming more will be done for "the people". (One has to question which "people" benefit most from each new-law created...)

Now this is where I get stuck and so incredibly frustrated -- I cannot help but think a large bulk of the general public tends to forget those in high-positions LIE because it benefits them and their own personal interests. AND, I cannot help but think a large bulk of the general public wants to believe what leaders tell them because most people don't want to believe they have been grossly fooled. This refusal to believe church and elected leaders can do no wrong terrifies me, for many reasons, but I digress...

Back to every-day life, for the common people.... if a person spends a bulk of his childhood with and among a variety of untrustworthy abusive people, honestly, what sort of development can most people expect? What sort of disposition do people expect the angry and abused to have? Add to this the simple truth that pure evil can easily lurk behind kind faces... (a troubling reality many people "put-in-care" have had (and continue) to face). In fact, historically speaking, more and more articles and documentaries are featuring the stories of parents and children who were "offered help" by government/charity workers, only to learn physical and sexual abuse was the rule, not the exception.

So... what's a person to do when lies and abuse are coming from the same source? From a broad-scope social-perspective, how does all of this affect the person who has been hurt and failed by "kind looking" people over and over again? How likely is that hurt and angry person ever going to feel as if he/she can ever trust his own feelings or the words of those in positions of authority... and how is that isolated angry person going to try to gain the attention of others?

The way I see it, more and more people have to realize, the longer this poor treatment of poor people and minorities continues, the more likely large groups are going to lash-out in anger.... and these angry groups are going to be mad as hell. [After all, what did 9/11 show us about the hidden hatred inside of some people?]